Hail Norochcholai! Hail the Chief!

Susantha Goonatilake

COAL POWER PLANT: One of the most significant steps taken by the present President shunning the inaction of both Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremasinghe was the firm decision to go ahead with the Norochcholai coal power plant.

This was a very self-evident decision which had been prevented from being taken much earlier by a section of the Catholic Church and an equally obscurantist, uninformed environmental lobby. While congratulating the President for taking this obvious step, I wish to put some facts into perspective.

I have some personal stake in this. I was Vice-Chairman of the Ceylon Electricity Board in the late 1970s when the coal power plant was first mooted. Secondly, I have been professionally involved in technology assessment including environmental assessment, and thirdly, I was involved with the cement plant at Puttalam which is being held up as the great polluter (which of course it is now) which would be replicated in the nearby coal power plant.

Let us take a snapshot view of our energy, simplifying somewhat for a lay audience. One can arrange the cheapness of commonly available electrical energy in a descending order from hydropower to coal power to diesel generated power to gas turbines. To install hydropower, it takes time to build dams etc.

A coal power plant could be built in a shorter time; diesel power plant could be bought quicker than coal power and gas turbines still quicker. Most of our major hydropower resources were exhausted during the Mahaveli development and thereafter. There is the potential of mini Hydro plants, that is very small hydropower plants. But their total potential is small. To simplify matters, the cheapest available energy that is reliable, in that the technology is fully proven, is coal.

We had an energy crisis a few years ago with hours-long power cuts. Further, our energy is one of the most expensive in the world. This means consumers - both domestic and commercial pay heavily. In our bid to attract foreign investment for new industries, cost and reliability of energy is an important factor. The coal power plant is an obvious choice to give reliable energy at relatively low cost.

During the last few decades instead of going into this cheap energy source, we have been adding other sources of more expensive power at Kelanitissa. Various objections were made against the obvious coal power choice.

The coal power plant was first mooted in the late 1970s when I was Vice-Chairman of the CEB. It was to be located at Trincomalee but, if my memory serves correct, due to some environmental objections, the idea was dropped. This was not such a major disaster because Mahaveli was in a full construction phase then and we were expecting a large addition of hydro power to the grid. But such hydro power is liable to the vagaries of the weather and rainfall.

So one should have additional power in the form of thermal plant. For this, a gas turbine was hurriedly added in the early 80s. (Incidentally the particular choice for this gas turbine was done over the objections of all the technical committees in the CEB as well as its Board through a manipulated Cabinet decision influenced by the then minister who recommended a more costly gas turbine instead of the lowest bidder with an identical technology.)

Since then, the easy path of adding costly plant has been followed. When the Norochcholai site was mooted, the sections of the Catholic Church took the lead in objecting to the plant. The reasons given for objection have been a mixed bag. One of the potent arguments had been that the coal power plant would pollute the area like the nearby Puttalam cement plant. But the pollution created by the cement plant is not because of an inherent design fault, but because of extremely poor upkeep and maintenance.

I know this well. As a young trainee engineer in Germany, I helped develop the electrostatic dust removal for the cement plant. It was very standard technology and would have given absorption of pollutants up to nearly hundred per cent. Unfortunately through the years, that plant was poorly maintained and many of the technicians trained for the purpose were moved out or left. The present Puttalam pollution is an avoidable one, entirely man-made.

Pollutants are carried to great distances by the air. Thus pollution from the heavily industrialised German Ruhr region was carried to the Nordic countries and affected their forests badly. A few years ago I was in a little sub committee meeting at the SLAAS to discuss the environmental consequences of the coal power plant.

When I asked whether there were any coal power plants across in nearby India - which I had been earlier informed there were - and what would be their wind borne pollution in and around the Puttalam and Kalpitiya area, no one could answer.

The bottom line is that coal power plant emissions can be transported large distances so that one must consider also possible Indian pollution not just that of our plants alone. But the central consideration is that coal power plants operate in highly populated areas across the world and there is proven technology to make them less polluting.

Industrialisation has always been accompanied by some degree of environmental impact and pollution. Environment concerns had risen only recently, over the last 40 years. When Britain and Europe were developing rapidly, there was a huge amount of pollution. Now there is of course consideration of environmental impact. And China and India, the new emerging giants also produce pollution as they race ahead in their industrialisation.

Those working in the Environmental Impact Assessment field are well aware that industrialists in other countries both in the private and public sector generally tend to attack environmental assessment as technology arrestment.

When the environmental conference in R­o took place, these factors were discussed and taken into account. A big United Nations meeting was held in Paris shortly thereafter to consider industrialisation in view of the new global considerations on environmental damage. (I was the rapporteur for this meeting and was later expected to bring out a book summarising the various issues. Unfortunately I failed in my duty to edit some of the excellent papers and bring out the book.)

So the choice of location of an industry or any plant has to choose between its benefits and cost to the environment. Technology assessment for environmental impact has to be balanced so that it does not lead to technology arrestment.

For a country desiring to rapidly industrialize like Sri Lanka, it is natural that sometimes the trade off will result in setting up of industries that will inevitably damage the environment somewhat for the sake of the increased economic benefits that it would ultimately bring. Such decisions are not easy and are often an uncomfortable trade off. But in our coal power plant case, the environmental costs are manageable.

There has also been the engineering lunatic fringe that has been opposing the coal power plant saying that technologies like wind power and wave power should be used instead. These are still not standard technologies that can be plucked off the shelf. An observation is called for here. Most engineers in developing countries are strongly oriented towards buying established technologies because those in semi-experimental stages carry unwanted risks both technological and financial.

That is why many firms prefer to buy foreign technologies that have a proven track record instead of developing local ones that they may have to nurture and muddle through. This is an unfortunate but true fact of the real world. In Sri Lanka, the university engineering field has grown up tangential to industrial development unlike in the case of India, China and even smaller countries like Malaysia.

There, the intimate link between industry and academia ensures that real life solutions are quickly arrived at.

An additional factor is that key decision-makers in these states are technology oriented. In the case of India, even among civil servants, the science and technology ethos first begun by Nehru permeates throughout the state sector. In the case of China, most political decision-makers are engineers as is the case of Taiwan and so on. The result is that decisions are made quickly on industrial requirements.

But our industry and development oriented engineers have stood their ground. A major champion of coal power in Sri Lanka for decades was the late Carlo Fernando; if my memory serves me correct, both a good Catholic as well as having served in the coal power industry in the UK. Competent experts like Dr. Siyambalapitiya wrote many popular articles and gave many lectures at engineering and professional fora illustrating the rationality of the coal option.

A special mention should be made of the CEB General Manager Ranjit Fonseka who, unusual among the usual supine public officials, has fearlessly advocated the coal power option. A grateful nation, its industries and consumers will thank them and the commonsensical President who gave the final go-ahead. Wait now for cheaper and reliable power. Switch the lights on.